An advertising agency agreed to settle a complaint brought by state and federal regulators over the creation and dissemination of allegedly deceptive radio advertisements for weight-loss products.

In this INSIDER Q&A, experts in contract manufacturing discuss aspects a brand owner should evaluate, what should be outlined in an agreement and what ongoing QA checks to conduct during the partnership.

A doctor, researcher and former chronic migraine sufferer, has launched her own biotech startup company named KetoSwiss selling supplements that she argues can help control migraine pain by tapping into our own biological mechanisms.

It is "inconceivable" that immunity will not remain high on the list of health priorities when this pandemic ends and now is the time to create more "convincing experiences" to ensure trial turns into adoption, according to food and drink research and branding experts.

NutraIngredients is pleased to announce the shortlisted finalists for the 2020 edition of the NutraIngredients Awards ... with the winners to be announced in the first online awards ceremony next week (May 13th).

Members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) will continue to work together towards more inclusive and sustainable growth, pledged APEC Senior Officials at the concluding event for Chile’s host year of APEC.

Chinese Taipei has voluntarily contributed USD 550,000 in funding to support APEC initiatives that advance regional economic integration and inclusive sustainable growth across the Asia-Pacific.

Broaden opportunities for people and ensure more inclusive growth across the Asia-Pacific, urged the 2020 Chair of APEC Senior Officials, host of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in 2020.

Wednesday’s initial public offering for Cambridge-based Ra Pharmaceuticals marked the ninth biotech startup to go public this year, tying the number in 2013 but still less than either of the two years since. Ra (Nasdaq: RARX), which has 40 employees in one of the former Pfizer buildings in Alewife, ended up with the third-largest IPO size for any Massachusetts-based biotech in 2016, with a total of $92 million raised from the sale of 7 million shares for $13 each. That’s more than the $86 million…

Third Rock Ventures, the Boston-based venture capital firm behind some of the Bay State’s most prominent biotechs, has reclaimed its title as the biggest life science-focused VC firm in the state with a new $616 million round, and has also named its first female partner in eight years. With the announcement of its Fund IV today — its largest ever — the firm now has raised $1.9 billion in the nine years since it was formed. That eclipses its rival across the Charles River, Flagship Ventures,…

The Alliance met (virtually) on April 15 with Dr. Caitlin Boon, FDA Associate Commissioner for Food Policy and Response and several of her colleagues. She described CFSAN’s and CVM’s role in responding to the current pandemic, as well as how the agency is assuring a continued safe food supply. About 50% of food spending in the […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Five lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill giving a full range of medical services to families with children who have life-limiting illnesses and who qualify for Medicaid, which currently has gaps in such coverage.

The Children’s Program of All-Inclusive Coordinated Care (ChiPACC) Act (H.R. 6560) would let states create comprehensive care programs for these children. Its authors are the Co-Chairs of the Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus: Representatives Michael McCaul (R-TX), Jackie Speier (D-CA), G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), and Mike Kelly (R-PA), together with Representative Diana DeGette (D-CO), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“Families with children facing life-limiting illnesses need all the support they can get, and they should be empowered to seek out that support,” the bill’s sponsors said in a joint statement. “We owe it to these kids and their loved ones to help ensure more compassionate care in their most trying times.”

Gaps in Medicaid coverage of hospice and palliative services have deprived many beneficiaries of the care they need because the program does not cover some of children’s unique medical needs.

Under this bill, the family of every child who qualifies for Medicaid will receive a specialized care plan covering a range of services – palliative, counseling, respite, expressive therapy and bereavement – providing them and their families greater comfort and peace of mind.

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AskBio acquires gene therapy biotech working on treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.

Posted by Roger Bate Cairo, Egypt – While its economy is still suffering from weak tourism, its new government is trying to do its best to bolster its modest regulatory structures to oversee medicines. With a population of approaching 90 million, Africa’s third most populous nation, is an important final destination for medicines, and a key transit point too. But it’s not just good medicines that Egypt needs to assess and ensure are procured, it has to prevent the bad &ndash [...]

by Derek Willis

In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.

However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.

The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”

PILF regularly sues state and local election officials to force them to purge some voters from registration rolls, including those it claims have duplicate registrations from another state or who are dead. It is headed by J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney who was a member of the Trump administration’s disbanded commission on election integrity.

The report describes as “missing” all mail ballots that were delivered to a valid address but not returned to be counted. In a statement accompanying the report, Adams said that unaccounted-for ballots “represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat.” In particular, the organization argues that the number of unreturned ballots would grow if more states adopt voting by mail.

Experts who study voting and use the same data PILF used in the report, which is from the Election Administration and Voting Survey produced by the federal Election Assistance Commission, say that it’s wrong to describe unreturned ballots as missing.

“Election officials ‘know’ what happened to those ballots,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College, who is the director of the Early Voting Information Center, a research group based there. “They were received by eligible citizens and not filled out. Where are they now? Most likely, in landfills,” Gronke said by email.

A recent RealClear Politics article based on the PILF report suggested that an increase in voting by mail this year could make the kind of fraud uncovered in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in 2018 more likely. In that case, a political consultant to a Republican candidate was indicted on charges of absentee ballot fraud for overseeing a paid ballot collection operation. “The potential to affect elections by chasing down unused mail-in ballots and make sure they get counted — using methods that may or may not be legal — is great,” the article argues.

PILF’s report was mentioned in other news outlets including the Grand Junction Sentinel in Colorado, “PBS NewsHour” and the New York Post. The Washington Times repeated the inaccurate claim of 1 million undeliverable mail ballots.

In a statement, the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy group, challenged the characterization of the 28.3 million ballots as missing. Of those ballots, 12 million were mailed by election officials in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which by law send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter, roughly 30% of which are not returned for any given election. “Conflating voters choosing not to cast their ballots with ‘missing’ ballots is a fundamental flaw,” the statement reads.

In an interview, Logan Churchwell, the communications director for PILF, acknowledged the error in the number of undelivered ballots, but defended the report’s conclusions, saying that it showed potential vulnerabilities in the voting system. “Election officials send these ballots out in the mail, and for them to say ‘I have no idea what happened after that’ speaks more to the investments they haven’t made to track them,” he said in a telephone interview.

But 36 states have adopted processes where voters and local officials can track the status of mail ballots through delivery, much like they can track packages delivered to a home. Churchwell said there are other explanations why mail ballots are not returned and that state and local election officials could report more information about the status of mail ballots. “If you know a ballot got to a house, you can credibly say that ballot’s status is not unknown,” he said.

The EAVS data has been published after every general election since 2004, although not every local jurisdiction provides complete responses to its questions.

In the data, election officials are asked to provide the number of mail ballots sent to voters, the number returned to be counted and the number of ballots returned as undeliverable by the U.S. Postal Service, which provides specific ballot-tracking services. The survey also asks for the number of ballots that are turned in or invalidated by voters who chose to cast their ballots in person. It asks officials to report the number of ballots that do not fit into any of those categories, or are “otherwise unable to be tracked by your office.”

Gronke described the last category as “a placeholder for elections officials to put numbers so that the whole column adds up,” and said that there was no evidence to support calling those ballots a pathway to large-scale voter fraud.

Numerous academic studies have shown that cases of voter fraud are extremely rare, although they do occur, and that fraud in mail voting seems to occur more often than with in-person voting.

by ProPublica

The Pulitzer Board announced Monday that two series published by ProPublica were awarded Pulitzer Prizes. “Lawless,” a ProPublica Local Reporting Network project by the Anchorage Daily News that revealed how indigenous people in Alaska are denied public safety services, was awarded the prize for public service. “Disaster in the Pacific,” an investigation on the staggering leadership failures that led to deadly accidents in the Navy and Marines, won a national reporting prize. The two designations are ProPublica’s 6th Pulitzer win in 12 years and the first Pulitzer awarded to a Local Reporting Network partner.

Led by Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins, “Lawless” was the first comprehensive investigation to lay bare Alaska’s failing, two-tiered justice system in which Native villages are denied access to first responders. In much of rural Alaska, villages can only be reached by plane, and calling 911 to report an emergency often means waiting hours or days for help to arrive.

The series evolved from a string of stories that Hopkins reported in 2018 for the Daily News, recounting horrific incidents of sexual assault in Alaska — which has the nation’s highest rate of sexual violence — and policing failures that have allowed offenders to continue the abuse with impunity. To fully investigate issues of lawlessness and sexual assault in the most remote communities in the U.S., the Daily News applied to participate in ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. The program partners with newsrooms across the country, paying the salary and a stipend for benefits for local reporters who spend a year tackling big investigative stories that are crucial to their communities. Participating reporters work with a ProPublica senior editor and receive support, including from ProPublica’s data, research and engagement teams.

The collaboration’s first story, based on more than 750 public records requests and interviews, found that one in three rural Alaska communities has no local law enforcement of any kind. These indigenous communities are also among the country’s most vulnerable, with the highest rates of sexual assault, suicide and domestic violence. The series’ second major installment found that dozens of Alaska communities, desperate for police of any kind, hired officers convicted of felonies, domestic violence, assault and other offenses that would make them ineligible to work in law enforcement or even as security guards anywhere else in the country.

Next, Hopkins revealed how the state’s 40-year-old Village Public Safety Officer Program, designed to recruit villagers to work as life-saving first responders, has failed by every measure. Alaska had quietly denied funding for basic recruitment and equipment costs for these unarmed village officers while publicly claiming to prioritize public safety spending. “Lawless” also exposed how the Alaska State Troopers agency, created to protect Alaska Native villages, instead patrols mostly white suburbs surrounding cities on the road system like Wasilla. The series ended with a list of six practical solutions to Alaska’s law enforcement crisis, based on interviews with experts, village leaders, the Alaska congressional delegation and sexual assault survivors.

The Daily News and ProPublica faced a number of challenges in reporting the series. The first: No one knew which remote Alaska villages had police officers of any kind. So they built the first-ever statewide policing database by drawing on payroll, arrest and hiring records from communities spread across the state. They also contacted every village city government, sovereign tribal administrator and Alaska Native corporation in the state — more than 600 organizations.

The vastness of the state and the fact that 80% of communities aren’t on the road system posed another challenge. Journalists flew hundreds of miles, sleeping on the floors of schoolhouse libraries and riding in sleds and on snowmobiles. To aid the reporting, they also held a community meeting in Kotzebue, Alaska, where a 10-year-old girl had been raped and murdered in 2018, providing residents, advocates, tribal leaders and law enforcement their first chance for a public discussion on sexual violence. Throughout the year the reporters spoke to more than 300 people across the state.

Following publication of the first major story, U.S. Attorney General William Barr visited the state and declared the lack of law enforcement in rural Alaska to be a federal emergency. The declaration led the Department of Justice to promise more than $52 million in federal funding for public safety in Alaska villages. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage announced the hiring of additional rural prosecutors, while Gov. Mike Dunleavy said the state will post 15 additional state troopers in rural Alaska. In addition, the Alaska Police Standards Council has proposed changing state regulations that govern the hiring and screening of village police officers, and Alaska legislators proposed legislation that would increase pay for VPSOs and overhaul funding of the program.

The Daily News’ Loren Holmes, Bill Roth, Marc Lester, David Hulen, Anne Raup, Vicky Ho, Alex Demarban, Jeff Parrott, Michelle Theriault Boots, Tess Williams, Tegan Hanlon, Zaz Hollander, Annie Zak, Shady Grove Oliver and Kevin Powell, as well as ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein, Adriana Gallardo, Alex Mierjeski, Beena Raghavendran, Nadia Sussman, Lylla Younes, Agnel Philip, Setareh Baig and David Sleight also contributed to the series.

“The ProPublica Local Reporting Network was started to give local newsrooms across America the resources and support they need to execute investigative journalism that digs deep and holds power to account,” Ornstein, a ProPublica deputy managing editor, said. “This powerful collaboration with the Anchorage Daily News investigation does exactly that, going far beyond reporting on isolated incidents to provide meticulous research and context on how the justice system has failed Alaska’s most remote and vulnerable communities. Most importantly, it has been a force for real change.”

In their “Disaster in the Pacific” series, ProPublica reporters T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi centered on three deadly accidents in the Navy and Marines in 2017 and 2018. They exposed America’s vaunted 7th Fleet as being in crisis with broken ships and planes, poor training for and multiple warnings ignored by its commanders. The costs: 17 dead sailors in crashes involving Navy warships, and six Marines killed in a training accident.

The back-to-back accidents in 2017 and 2018 gained initial attention from Congress and the national media, but they had been told an incomplete, misleading and dangerous story of half-truths and cover-ups. ProPublica’s series provided the first full accounting of culpability, tracing responsibility to the highest uniformed and civilian ranks of the Navy. The reporting team spent 18 months on the investigation, obtaining more than 13,000 pages of confidential Navy records and interviewing hundreds of officials up and down the chain-of-command.

The first article in the series, “Fight the Ship,” reconstructed a 2017 crash involving the USS Fitzgerald, one of the deadliest accidents in the history of the Navy. The story showed that the accident was entirely preventable, and that the Navy’s senior leadership had endangered the warship by sending a shorthanded and undertrained crew to sea with outdated and poorly maintained equipment. To show readers what happened, ProPublica hired designer Xaquín G.V. Working with investigations producer Lucas Waldron, Xaquín used geodata on the ships’ locations, mapped the path of each vessel and created a graphic that simulated the crash, down to the moment the Fitzgerald was sent spinning out of control, rotating 360 degrees. The team also collected radar images, ship blueprints, hand-drawn images made by surviving sailors and video taken inside the ship, which allowed them to portray the disaster from the perspective of the sailors onboard.

A second story, “Years of Warnings, Then Death and Disaster,” detailed how the fatal crash of the USS Fitzgerald, and of the USS McCain weeks later, were the result of a congressional gutting of the Navy and the Navy’s prioritization of building new ships. Top Navy officials gave urgent, repeated warnings to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus about the deadly risks facing its fleet, including being short of sailors, sailors poorly trained and worked to exhaustion, warships physically coming apart, and ships routinely failing tests to see if they were prepared to handle warfighting duties. They were ignored, told to be quiet or even ordered to resign.

Another story captured the Marine Corps multiple failures that were responsible for the deaths of six men in a nighttime training exercise 15,000 feet above the Pacific — an accident that senior leaders had been warned was possible, even likely. ProPublica created an animated short documentary, using a combination of an on-camera interview, 3D animation, 2D illustration and atmospheric footage to bring the excruciating hours of a needless tragedy to light. Through extensive interviews with eyewitnesses, the team reconstructed the moments leading up to the crash, the crash itself and the botched search and rescue effort.

The series also illuminated how the Navy’s reckless management of the 7th Fleet was measured not only in fatalities, but also in the hurt and shame of the rank-and-file sailors whom the Navy blamed and prosecuted for the accidents. The Navy’s prosecution of Navy Cmdr. Bryce Benson for what were clearly systemic shortcomings, traceable all the way to the Pentagon, left many of its own furious and demoralized.

Weeks after the first story’s publication, the House Armed Services Committee convened a panel to challenge senior Navy leaders over their claims that they had been fully truthful about its failings and its efforts at reform. The reporting forced the Navy to admit to Congress that its claims about its rate of progress on reform were misleading. In light of ProPublica’s reporting on the improper role that the Navy’s top commander played in the prosecution of Benson, one of captains on the USS Fitzgerald, the Navy dropped all criminal charges. U.S. and NATO Navy commands throughout the world have ordered sailors and officers to read the ProPublica accounts as part of training and education.

Joseph Sexton, Tracy Weber, Agnes Chang, Katie Campbell, Joe Singer, Kengo Tsutsumi, Ruth Baron, David Sleight, Sisi Wei, Claire Perlman, Joshua Hunt and Nate Schweber also contributed to this series.

“The Navy actively blocked reporting at every step, with communications officers attempting to dissuade officials from conducting interviews with ProPublica and leaking positive stories to competing media outlets in an attempt to front-run our stories,” ProPublica Managing Editor Robin Fields said. “The military even threatened that we could be criminally prosecuted for publishing the material we obtained. This tour de force of investigative journalism is a testament to the unflinching tenacity of the reporters and the innovation of ProPublica’s data, graphics, research and design teams. Their essential work laid bare the avoidance of responsibility by the military’s most senior leaders.”

by Justin Elliott, Paul Kiel and Lydia DePillis

Through programs like the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program and the Federal Reserve’s Main Street Lending Program, the federal government is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, loans and bond purchases to help businesses amid the coronavirus-sparked economic crisis. Each program comes with different strings, but their basic purpose is to keep workers on the payroll.

We want to know what this means for your workplace. How has your company treated its workers during the crisis? Have you or your colleagues been laid off, furloughed or otherwise affected? Have you seen money used in surprising ways? What do you think we should be reporting on?

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, here is what we suggest. Send questions to bailout@propublica.org.

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by J. David McSwane

The Transportation Security Administration ignored guidance from the Department of Homeland Security and internal pushback from two agency officials when it stockpiled more than 1.3 million N95 respirator masks instead of donating them to hospitals, internal records and interviews show.

Internal concerns were raised in early April, when COVID-19 cases were growing by the thousands and hospitals in some parts of the country were overrun and desperate for supplies. The agency held on to the cache of life-saving masks even as the number of people coming through U.S. airports dropped by 95% and the TSA instructed many employees to stay home to avoid being infected. Meanwhile, other federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs’ vast network of hospitals, scrounged for the personal protective equipment that doctors and nurses are dying without.

“We don’t need them. People who are in an infectious environment need them. Nobody is flying,” Charles Kielkopf, a TSA attorney based in Columbus, Ohio, told ProPublica. “You don’t take things for yourself. It’s the wrong thing to do.”

Kielkopf shared a copy of an official whistleblower complaint he filed Monday. In it, he alleges the agency had engaged in gross mismanagement that represented a “substantial and specific danger to public health.”

TSA has not required its screeners to wear N95s, which require fitting and training to use properly, and internal memos show most are using surgical masks, which are more widely available but are less effective and lack the same filtering ability.

Kielkopf raised a red flag last month about the TSA’s plan to store N95 respirators it had been given by Customs and Border Protection, which found more than a million old but usable masks in an Indiana warehouse. Both agencies are overseen by DHS. That shipment added to 116,000 N95s the TSA had left over from the swine flu pandemic of 2009, a TSA memo shows. While both stockpiles were older than the manufacturer’s recommended shelf life, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that expired masks remain effective against spreading the virus.

Kielkopf and another TSA official in Minnesota suggested that the agency send its N95 masks to hospitals in early April, records show. Instead, TSA quietly stored many of them in its warehouse near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and dispersed the rest to empty airports across the nation.

“We need to reserve medical masks for health care workers,” Kielkopf said, “not TSA workers who are behind an X-ray machine.”

The Number of Travelers Passing TSA Checkpoints Has Dropped to Historic Lows

The TSA didn’t provide answers to several detailed questions sent by ProPublica, but spokesman Mark Howell said in an email that the agency’s “highest priority is to ensure the health, safety and security of our workforce and the American people.”

“With the support of CBP and DHS, in April, TSA was able to ensure a sufficient supply of N95 masks would be available for any officer who chose to wear one and completed the requisite training,” the statement read.

“We are continuing to acquire additional personal protective equipment for our employees to ensure both their and the traveling public’s health and safety based on our current staffing needs, and as supplies become available,” TSA said.

A review of federal contracting data shows the agency has mostly made modest purchases such as a $231,000 purchase for gallons of disinfectant, but has not reported any new purchases of N95s.

An internal TSA memo last month said the surplus of N95s was expected to last the agency about 30 days, but the same memo noted that estimate did not account for the drastic decline in security officers working at airports. ProPublica asked how long the masks were actually going to last, accounting for the decreased staffing levels.

“While we cannot provide details on staffing, passenger throughput and corresponding operations have certainly decreased,” the TSA statement said.

The trade journal Government Executive reported this week that internal TSA records showed most employee schedules have been “sharply abbreviated,” while an additional 8,000 security screeners are on paid leave over concerns that they could be exposed to the virus.

More than 500 TSA employees have tested positive for COVID-19, the agency reported, and five have died.

The CDC has not recommended the use of N95s by TSA staff, records show, but that doesn’t mean workers who have or want to wear them can’t.

In one April 7 email, DHS Deputy Under Secretary for Management Randolph D. Alles sent guidance to TSA officials, urging them to wear homemade cloth face coverings and maintain social distancing. But the N95s, which block 95% of particles that can transmit the virus, were in notoriously short supply and should be “reserved” for health care workers.

“The CDC has given us very good information about how to make masks that are suitable, so that we can continue to reserve medical masks and PPE for healthcare workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic,” Alles wrote.

But two days later, on April 9, Cliff Van Leuven, TSA’s federal security director in Minnesota, followed up and asked why he had been sent thousands of masks despite that guidance.

“I just received 9,000 N-95 masks that I have very little to no need for,” he said in the email, which was first reported by Government Executive. “We’ve made N95s available to our staff and, of the officers who wear masks, they overwhelmingly prefer the surgical masks we just received after a couple months on back order.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had publicly asked that anyone who had PPE donate their surplus to the state’s Department of Health, Van Leuven said in the email to senior TSA staff.

“I’d like to donate the bulk of our current stock of N-95s in support of that need and keep a small supply on hand,” he wrote, adding the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport had screened fewer than 1,500 people the previous day, about a third of which were airport staff.

Van Leuven declined to comment, referring questions to a TSA spokesperson.

Later that day, Kielkopf forwarded the concerns to TSA attorneys in other field offices, trying to get some attention to the stockpile he felt would be better used at hospitals.

“I am sharing with you some issues we are having with n95 masks in Minnesota,” he wrote. “And the tension between our increasing supply of n95 masks at our TSA airport locations and the dire need for them in the medical community.”

Weeks went by, and finally, on May 1, Kielkopf wrote: “I have been very disappointed in our position to keep tens of thousands of n95 masks while healthcare workers who have a medical requirement for the masks — because of their contact with infected people — still go without.”

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about why it transferred N95 masks to TSA despite a top official saying they should be reserved for healthcare workers.

“So now the TSA position is that we desperately need these masks for the protection of our people,” Kielkopf said. “At the same time, most of our people aren’t even working. It’s a complete 180 that doesn’t make any sense.”

Do you have access to information about federal contracts that should be public? Email david.mcswane@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

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by Michael Grabell

On Tuesday, March 31, an emergency room doctor at the main hospital in Grand Island, Nebraska, sent an urgent email to the regional health department: “Numerous patients” from the JBS beef packing plant had tested positive for COVID-19. The plant, he feared, was becoming a coronavirus “hot spot.”

The town’s medical clinics were also reporting a rapid increase in cases among JBS workers. The next day, Dr. Rebecca Steinke, a family medicine doctor at one of the clinics, wrote to the department’s director: “Our message is really that JBS should shut down for 2 weeks and have a solid screening plan before re-opening.”

Teresa Anderson, the regional health director, immediately drafted a letter to the governor.

But during a conference call that Sunday, Gov. Pete Ricketts made it clear that the plant, which produces nearly 1 billion pounds of beef a year and is the town’s largest employer, would not be shut down.

Since then, Nebraska has become one of the fastest-growing hot spots for the novel coronavirus in the United States, and Grand Island has led the way. Cases in the city of 50,000 people have skyrocketed from a few dozen when local health officials first reported their concerns to more than 1,200 this week as the virus spread to workers, their families and the community.

The dismissed warnings in Grand Island, documented in emails that ProPublica obtained under the state’s public records law, show how quickly the virus can spread when politicians overrule local health officials. But on a broader scale, the events unfolding in Nebraska provide an alarming case study of what may come now that President Donald Trump has used the Defense Production Act to try to ensure meat processing plants remain open, severely weakening public health officials’ leverage to stop the spread of the virus in their communities.

Ricketts spokesman Taylor Gage said the governor explained on the call with local officials that the plant would stay open because it was declared an essential industry by the federal government. Two and a half weeks later, as cases were rising among the state’s meatpacking workers, Ricketts, a Republican businessman whose father founded the brokerage TD Ameritrade, held a news conference and said he couldn’t foresee a scenario where he would tell the meatpacking plants to close because of their importance to the nation’s food supply.

“Can you imagine what would happen if people could not go to the store and get food?” he asked. “Think about how mad people were when they couldn’t get paper products.”

“Trust me,” he added, “this would cause civil unrest.”

In the last two weeks, small meatpacking towns across Nebraska have experienced outbreaks, including at a Tyson Foods beef plant in Dakota City, a Costco chicken plant in Fremont and a Smithfield Foods pork plant in Crete. With the governor vowing to keep plants open, the companies have only in recent days decided to close for deep cleanings as cases have grown to staggering levels.

In Grand Island, two hours west of Omaha, the consequences of the governor’s decision came quickly. The CHI Health St. Francis hospital, which has 16 intensive care beds, was soon overwhelmed. At one point in April, it had so many critical patients that it had to call in three different helicopter companies to airlift patients to larger hospitals in Lincoln and Omaha, said Beth Bartlett, the hospital’s vice president for patient care.

JBS workers felt the strain, too. Under pressure to keep the food supply chain flowing, some of the plant’s 3,500 workers, many hailing from Latin America, Somalia and Sudan, said they were told to report for work regardless. In a letter to the governor last week, Nebraska Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy group, said a JBS worker had been told by his supervisor that if he tested positive, he should come to work anyway and “keep it on the DL” or he’d be fired. Some workers who’d been told to quarantine after being exposed told ProPublica this week that they were called back to work before the 14-day window recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — even if they felt sick. One worker in the offal, or entrails, section recently fainted in the plant, they said, but was told he couldn’t go home.

Cameron Bruett, head of corporate affairs for JBS, said the company has worked in partnership with local officials to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and did not influence the governor’s decision to keep the plant open. He pointed to comments made recently by University of Nebraska Medical Center officials who toured the plant, who said JBS has put in place some “best practices,” including installing barriers on the meat cutting line, communicating new precautions in multiple languages and ensuring the proper use of masks.

Bruett said no one is forced to come to work or punished for calling in sick. “Such actions, if true, would be grotesque and a clear violation of our culture,” he said.

The emails obtained by ProPublica show that local health officials have traced 260 cases to the JBS plant. But that was nearly two weeks ago and almost certainly underestimates the total. Anderson, who directs the Central District Health Department, said she hasn’t had enough tests to do targeted testing of JBS employees and is only testing people when they’re symptomatic. In Grand Island and its surrounding county, 32 people have died from the virus. According to workers, at least one of those was a JBS employee.

Across the country, more than 10,000 COVID-19 cases have been linked to meatpacking plants, and at least three dozen workers are known to have died, a ProPublica review of news reports and government health data shows.

While cases in the worst hit urban areas like New York appear to have plateaued, the nation’s meatpacking towns have continued to see spikes. A few large outbreaks have dominated public attention, but COVID-19 cases have popped up in well over 100 plants in mostly rural communities. There the virus’s impact is magnified by the workers’ sometimes cramped living conditions, with multiple generations of immigrant and refugee families often residing together in apartments, houses and trailers.

Before Trump’s order, more than 30 plants had shut down at least briefly to increase cleaning and control the spread among their workforces. The various closures have cut beef and pork production by more than a third compared with last year, causing supply chain disruptions for some supermarkets and fast-food chains.

Some of those closures show the role public health officials have had in the actions of large meatpacking companies like JBS, which has beef, pork and poultry plants in 27 states.

In Colorado, Dr. Mark Wallace of the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment and state health director Jill Hunsaker Ryan grew worried that that if the coronavirus spread at JBS’ Greeley plant, it would have a “devastating” effect on the community that “would quickly overwhelm the medical resources available in the hospitals.”

Unlike Nebraska, Colorado’s health officials eventually ordered the JBS plant to close. But documents obtained by ProPublica show the protracted debate that came before that decision, with JBS invoking the governor to question the formal closure order. By the time the order was issued, some public officials felt the virus had been given too big a head start.

Like Grand Island, Greeley officials were already hearing by the end of March that hospital emergency rooms were seeing a “high number of JBS employees,” according to an email Wallace sent April 1 to the plant’s occupational health director.

“Their concern, and mine, is far too many employees must be working when sick and spreading infection to others,” Wallace wrote, urging the plant to take additional safety measures.

Three days later, Wallace wrote a more detailed letter to JBS’ human resources director, Chris Gaddis, documenting the virus’s spread and threatening to shut the plant down if it didn’t screen employees and ensure they could work 6 feet apart.

But as days passed, the situation in Greeley didn’t improve.

“Want you to know my colleagues are not reassured by what I’m sharing about measures being implemented,” Wallace wrote to Gaddis. “‘The cat’s out of the bag’ is what all health care providers are saying — too many sick people already, too much spread already, etc.”

After nine days of back-and-forth, JBS agreed to close the plant and Hunsaker Ryan and Wallace issued a formal shutdown order. But negotiations seemed to stretch until the last minute, emails show.

After Hunsaker Ryan sent JBS the order on the afternoon of April 10, Gaddis appeared confused. “It is our understanding from the telephone conversation that the governor did not want this letter sent,” Gaddis wrote. “Please confirm it was properly sent.”

Bruett said the company’s impression was that the governor didn’t feel a formal order “was necessary given our voluntary decision to shut down.” But Conor Cahill, a spokesman for Gov. Jared Polis, said: “Of course the governor wanted the health order sent. The governor has been clear that JBS needs to be more transparent with their staff and the public about the situation at their plant.”

Notified of the shutdown by his staff, Greeley Mayor John Gates wrote in an email, “In my opinion, that should have happened a week ago for the health and safety of their employees.”

On Wednesday, the state announced the latest numbers on the JBS outbreak: 280 employees had tested positive for COVID-19, and seven of them had died.

The Grand Island beef plant opened in 1965 in a sugar beet farming area. In recent decades, the plant has drawn immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and more recently refugees from Somalia and Sudan. In a sign of the area’s shifting workforce, Somali residents have opened a mosque in the old El Diamante nightclub and a community center in the former Lucky 7 Saloon next to a Salvadoran restaurant named El Tazumal.

Members of those communities became among the first to hit the area’s medical clinics as the virus began to spread. By the last week in March, the Family Practice of Grand Island, where Steinke works, had opened a special respiratory clinic to handle COVID-19 patients. That week, six of the patients had come from JBS. But over three days from March 30 to April 1, the clinic saw 25 patients that carried JBS insurance, indicating they were either employees or their dependents.

Danny Lemos’ father was one of the first JBS workers to get sick from the virus in late March. The 62-year-old, who’d worked at the plant for a year, had developed a fever and a cough.

“One day, he was laying in the living room on a chair, wrapped up in a blanket, shivering,” Lemos said. “My mom takes his temperature, and he had a temperature of 105 and he was really having trouble breathing.”

His father was rushed to the hospital and put on a ventilator.

Within days, Lemos said he also started having trouble breathing and joined his father in the ICU. Lemos, 39, was put in a medically induced coma and given a 20% chance of living, he said.

Surprisingly, he said, he eventually recovered and was released from the hospital in late April. His father, Danny Lemos Sr., has been in the hospital for more than a month, most of the time on a ventilator, and is only now starting to recover.

Lemos said JBS should have taken better precautions.

“Shutting down right away, I think, probably would have helped a ton,” he said. “Do I think it would have kept everybody from getting sick? No, because those same people are still going to be out and about in the community. But just being so many people in one building, it was like a ticking time bomb.”

In an interview this week, Steinke said that it was hard to get the message across to JBS that more needed to be done.

“Even if they did not stop or shut down, if they would have put in better protections right from the start,” she said, “we would not have seen such a rapid rise in cases.”

At one point before the governor’s decision, the emails ProPublica obtained show, officials found language on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website that said local authorities could close a plant and the USDA would follow those decisions, potentially giving the health district some leverage.

“I guess I will send it to … HR there and maybe he will take us more seriously,” Anderson, the local health director, wrote in an email to the city administrator.

Under Trump’s executive order, that guidance has been reversed: The USDA could try to overrule local decisions if federal officials disagree.

That could pose a risk to the USDA’s own workforce of federal food inspectors, who work inside the plants to ensure the meat is safe to eat. According to the emails, some inspectors at the JBS plant also tested positive. Because inspectors sometimes monitor multiple sites, one inspector noted that she had recently worked in two other plants that have also had outbreaks, potentially spreading the virus within other plants.

“From my perspective,” temporarily closing the JBS plant “would have reduced the transmission,” Anderson said in an interview this week. “But if you shut down a plant and your 3,700 employees have nowhere to go, where are they going to go and how far is the spread going to be outside the plant vs. inside the plant? And if you end up going a month, what happens to their ability to feed their families?”

Anderson said that the “general feeling” she got from the call with the governor was that they needed to do more testing. So after the governor blocked the effort to close the plant, she continued to try to work collaboratively with JBS to encourage more testing of their employees.

In the emails, JBS officials said they were open to testing but repeatedly expressed concern about public disclosure of the results. “We want to make sure that testing is conducted in a way that does not foment fear or panic among our employees or the community,” JBS chief ethics and compliance officer Nicholas White wrote in an email to Anderson on April 15.

A week later, after the number of JBS cases was released by Anderson, Tim Schellpeper, president of the company’s U.S. beef processing operations, emailed her that he was worried about the amount of national attention it was attracting. “Have you given more thought to adding clarity/correction around this in your comments today?” he asked.

As JBS officials fretted about the optics of testing their employees, tensions within the families of the workers mounted. As the number of sick workers grew, the daughter of one worker, Miriam, said she was panicking about what would happen to her mother, who worked on the plant’s kill floor. At the end of every shift, she said, she called her mother to make sure she was okay.

“It was dreadful,” said Miriam, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her mother from retaliation. “It was just kind of living in fear waiting for the day she would have a fever. We knew it was going to happen because she’s a JBS employee. We didn’t think it was preventable anymore.”

Then, one day, she got a call from her mother, telling her that she had developed a fever and was being sent home.

“As she was changing in the locker room, she calls me and you can just hear the fear in her voice,” Miriam said.

Shortly after, her father tested positive for the virus too. Thankfully, she said, both her parents had only mild symptoms and have since recovered. But JBS and the governor should have done more, Miriam said.

“It just seemed like they were kind of careless,” she said. “I think it would have been a smart idea if not to close down the plant, to take more action to help the employees. They’re essential, but they need protection. They need to be kept safe.”

In the meantime, Ricketts has said that his approach of keeping the state “open for business” worked. And at a news conference Friday, he underscored the importance of the meatpacking industry to the state’s economy, proclaiming May as “Beef Month” in Nebraska.

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April 13, 2020 – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responding to the challenges of COVID-19 in new ways that streamline product review and policy approaches, while also ensuring that entities promoting unapproved products that claim to be effective against the virus do not go unchecked. Last week, the FDA and the Federal Trade […]

April 20, 2020 – With additional changes to the regulations still in administrative review and businesses grappling with pressing COVID-19 issues, a group of nearly 100 advertising trade associations, organizations and companies asked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) to delay the July 1 enforcement date for the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). But it […]

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